Declared array values

[profuncanny]

I am completely new to C and am working my way through a book (The C Programming Language). I have was messing with changing some of the example code and came across some "strange" default values for arrays.

When I declare an array, I'm expecting all the values to zero. However, when I loop through, some have a negative value, I am curious as to why.

So the code is:

#include <stdio.h>

main()
{
	int i, ndigit[10];
	
	printf("A: \n0: %d\n", ndigit[0]);
	printf("1: %d\n", ndigit[1]);
	printf("2d: %d\n", ndigit[2]);
	printf("2f: %f\n", ndigit[2]);
	printf("3: %d\n", ndigit[3]);
	printf("4: %d\n", ndigit[4]);
	printf("5: %d\n", ndigit[5]);
	printf("6: %d\n", ndigit[6]);
	printf("7: %d\n", ndigit[7]);
	printf("8: %d\n", ndigit[8]);
	printf("9: %d\n", ndigit[9]);

	for (i = 0; i < 10; ++i)
	{
		ndigit[i] = 0;
	}
	
	printf("B: \n0: %d\n", ndigit[0]);
	printf("1: %d\n", ndigit[1]);
	printf("2: %d\n", ndigit[2]);
	printf("3: %d\n", ndigit[3]);
	printf("4: %d\n", ndigit[4]);
	printf("5: %d\n", ndigit[5]);
	printf("6: %d\n", ndigit[6]);
	printf("7: %d\n", ndigit[7]);
	printf("8: %d\n", ndigit[8]);
	printf("9: %d\n", ndigit[9]);
}

which outputs:

A: 
0: 0
1: 0
2d: -1881143876
2f: -0.000000
3: 0
4: 0
5: 0
6: 0
7: 0
8: 0
9: -1881139893
B: 
0: 0
1: 0
2: 0
3: 0
4: 0
5: 0
6: 0
7: 0
8: 0
9: 0

I am obviously expecting the B output to all be 0 as I explicitly zero every value. However, why is A2 -1881143876 output as an integer, but -0.000000 as a float. And why is A9 a different value?

This is compiled on Mac OSX.

Thanks.

[Elysia]

The C standard makes no guarantees that data will be initialized to 0 at the time of creating them. They simply inhabit whatever happens to be in memory at that time.
Also read: http://cpwiki.sourceforge.net/Implicit_main

[robwhit]

Values which are not initialized have an indeterminate value when they are created (except for a few exceptions). To initialize all your array elements to all bits zero, do this:

int array[10] = { 0 } ;

[cas]

However, why is A2 -1881143876 output as an integer, but -0.000000 as a float.

First, floating point and integral representations aren't the same; that is, the bits that represent a particular number as an integer don't represent the same number when interpreted as a floating point value. The following code is not correct C, but it might show the difference. It assumes that floats and ints are the same size.

#include <stdio.h>

int main(void)
{
  int a;

  a = 1178658486;
  printf("%d\n%f\n", a, *(float *)&a);

  return 0;
}

Second, %f expects a double; you're passing an int. It's likely that on your system ints and doubles are different sizes, thus printf() will read more than you've given it. On a typical desktop system, it will take 4 bytes from your int, and 4 bytes from the memory adjacent to your int. Who knows what's there?

In reality, passing an int to %f is undefined behavior regardless of the sizes of the various types, but you can make assumptions about what will happen on most systems. Just don't write real code that relies on such assumptions!

[profuncanny]

Righto, thanks for the explanations